Oil Painting - Rutherford Rows

Here’s a oil painting of a photo I took recently on a trip to Napa Valley. I was in the Rutherford region at St. Supery Winery.

I took the photo looking down the rows of grapevines looking toward the Mayacama Mountains. There were lots of greens in this painting so I really had to be careful to use the different shades and values to differentiate the foreground, mid ground, and back ground. Below are my progress photos.

Here is the block in of the large shapes and colors.

My drawing of the rows wasn’t accurate so I had to scrape some paint and redraw before adding some more detailed colors and shadows for the grapevines.

At this stage I was reasonably happy with the grapevines but obviously still needed to put leaves on the tree. I added some highlighting to the sunlit tops of the grapevines and started to put leaves on the tree.

Here’s the almost completed painting. I went back after this stage and added some dark green leaves because I realized I had taken the highlights a little too far. You can see in my original photo at the bottom that I lightened the leaves from the photo quite a bit. I remember it being a hot sunny day and I feel like my painting captures more of that feel than the photo did.

Reference Photo

Hope you enjoyed seeing my painting and how I created it.